Open-Source Development Effort Gets First Korean MemberOpen-Source Development Effort Gets First Korean Member

A key South Korean research institute has joined the Open Source Development Lab to help further that organization's effort to develop versions of the Linux operating systems that meet the high-performance standards of telecom and data-center operations.

With the announcement Monday, Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute becomes the first Korean member of OSDL, a global consortium of companies and research organizations that employs Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes the adoption of a variety of open-source technologies.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute is a nonprofit government-funded research organization that has developed a number of technologies since its inception in 1976. This includes TDX-Exchange, a project completed in late 1995 and designed to serve as a homegrown digital exchange technology to help South Korea cope with the nation's drastically increasing domestic demand for telephone services. The institute also developed high-density semiconductor microchips, mini-supercomputer technology called TiCOM, and a digital mobile telecommunication system.

OSDL formed the Carrier-Grade Linux working group in 2002 and has issued several sets of specifications that outline the requirements that Linux must meet to serve as a telecom-industry operating system. Version 3.0 specifications issued in February focus on several key areas: providing at least 99.999% availability, with no downtime for systems maintenance and expansion; supporting remote management using existing management tools and standards; and providing better performance and the ability to work in high-availability clusters to eliminate any single point of failure in the hardware or software.

Data-Center Linux focuses on improving Linux capabilities in four chief data-center areas: security, hot-plug, clustering, and storage networking. OSDL established special-interest groups for each of the four areas last year, and volunteers began contributing through them. OSDL has in recent months expanded the group working on Data-Center Linux to include more international participants.